A few weeks ago, my stunningly beneficient boss got the whole company (okay, 5 of us) iPhones for business use. Despite my long long looong aversion to Apple’s products, I have to say it’s a pretty amazing piece of gadgetry, and at last they’ve finally produced a product I can pick up and not have screaming fights with about how something should be done, which is how I typically tend to interact with their operating systems. I realize I’m….what, 16 years in on this Microsoft OS thing and so I have become somewhat used to things being done a particular way so a little argumentativeness is to be expected.
But I’m getting sidetracked. There’s this phone thing I was talking about. What I meant to say is that it’s a device that I just picked up and used, without thinking about how to do it. The instruction booklet is still sitting in the box, unopened. About the only thing I’ve had to look up was how to remove an application, since that’s not immediately clear without someone showing you how to do it.
To backtrack a little, I’ve been eyeing the things since the launch of the product, but the initial high price and first-run jitters kept me away. Not to mention the insanely expensive plan, which runs (I’m told) about $200 a month if you go full-boat with data and whatnot. For a phone. I could get a Volkswagen for $600 down and $200 a month. So I bought a somewhat nice (and cheap) Windows Mobile “smart”phone (it’s really only moderately bright) about six months ago, as my “iPhone placeholder”, with plans to take the plunge in a year or so.
But then, about two months before the official launch, boss man told us he’d be getting us all iPhones when the new one came out. We were delightedly skeptical about this news (no sense in getting your hopes up, eh?), and were downgraded to merely delighted when he dished ‘em to us.
So for the past few weeks, I’ve been totally spoiled with this thing. It’s got…it’s got…everything. The only downside really is kind of crap battery life when Wi-Fi is turned on. I’ve been amusing myself with the various apps you can download (check your World of Warcraft character’s stats on the go! Newton’s Cradle! Mobile Pandora!) and mostly enjoying the hell out of it.
I’ve even (almost) made peace with iTunes at long last. I get what it’s trying to do for me most of the time, but it’s frustratingly stupid at others. But we’re at least on speaking terms. Now, if I could just get it to realize that I want it to sync my contacts and calendars and stuff with both my work and home computers, we’d be getting somewhere. As it is, I get not-very-well-worded warnings when I plug into one, then the other. I don’t know if it’s going to wipe stuff off one or the other or…I just don’t get it.
And being able to easily pull my contacts off the old phone and put them on the iPhone in some marginally intelligible manner (the damn thing never has properly worked with ActiveSync), then I’d be good. I hate having to double-enter stuff.
Neat toy. Get your employer to buy you one too is my advice.
